All the Names

All the names, I want them all. They roll around in my brain every day and when I say them, which I find myself doing with odd frequency, they taste of fine chocolates with intricate gold leafing, of all the strange candies I ate only with my grandmothers like bridge mix, licorice non-pareils, circus peanuts, liquid-centered espresso sweets.

All the names, I want them all. They are relics of lives and antiques of histories never set aside long enough to collect dust; they shine, instead, with a brilliance unparalleled in the intricately cut stained glass of church windows. They shine with the olive oil that seeps from my olive skin.

All the names, I want them all. To me they ring of deep-voiced men and their powerful animal sweat, their scratchy beards, a ring emanating from unwilling or unconscious relinquishing of women’s names, families, lives, emanating from the careworn bell curve of innumerable women’s hips.

All the  names, I want them all. I search them for way-back-when, for the hands that picked tomatoes and the lips that parted, blushing; I search them for my hidden pinkie toe and secretive nights spent reading alone; I search them for the intolerance and the traditions of submissiveness that were, and are, always called madness, hysteria.

All the names, I want them all: want their round fullness that softens my belly and spreads my heart wide open to rightfully take up space on a page, a book cover, the assignment sheets of my son, my daughter. I want the legacy of husbands that I might honor wives, want the legacy of fathers that I might honor daughters, however it pains me to honor sisters with the words and names of brothers alone.

All the names, I want them all: want to hear them on your tongue, mangled as they might be; want to correct you and see you blush on your second, third attempts, thanking you for trying again; want to know who you are when they roll of your tongue gorgeously, plainly, the way they sound in my head. I want to speak them aloud, all of them.

All the names, I want them all. Prized and polished but full of my own sorrow, sad weak links to the first of my mothers hidden from me at the end of a road paved and tended and guarded by their men, who had no way of knowing.

All the  names, I want them all: all their meaning, all their making; all the stories which cannot be told in this vapid American landscape with its foreign customs, foreign tongue. The familiar “Marsico” of my father, already mine, which supplanted my great-grandmother’s name, the one who was a midwife, an herbalist. The bold “Carta” and my mouth opens wide, an attestation to charts, maps, documents, papers; proof of lettered women. The “Gallinari” dances on my tongue, making up in some way for the stories I never knew, never learned. And the “Milani,” refined, but Roman after all, a name not to do with Milan but with time - a thousand years’ worth.

All the names, I want them all, as if the four: Jessica Elizabeth (from Elisabetta, which I prefer) Rita (chosen for Mom’s and Nonna’s patron saint of impossible cases and miserable marriages) Marsico - weren’t enough, I would that I could that I should add them all: Jessica Elisabetta Rita Marsico Milani Carta Gallinari and on and on into his story and her story back, all the way, to the time of the Nuraghi when maybe, just maybe, women’s names were theirs for life.